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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26483041">Cooperative Independent Studies</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/imagined_melody/pseuds/imagined_melody'>imagined_melody</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Community (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Coping, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexuality Crisis, Loneliness, Long-Distance Friendship, Post-Canon, Post-Finale, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 10:35:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,608</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26483041</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/imagined_melody/pseuds/imagined_melody</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The truth is, it’s not the same at Greendale without the rest of the study group. </i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Post-series finale, Jeff begins to spiral. And it turns out that reaching out is harder than it looks in the movies.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Abed Nadir &amp; Jeff Winger, Annie Edison &amp; Jeff Winger, Jeff Winger &amp; the Study Group, Shirley Bennett &amp; Jeff Winger, Troy Barnes &amp; Abed Nadir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>84</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Cooperative Independent Studies</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The truth is, it’s not the same at Greendale without the rest of the study group. </p>
<p>Deep down, Jeff always knew this was how it would be when they left. (He doesn’t examine too closely the fact that this has always been a <i>when</i>, rather than an <i>if</i>, for him.) The campus is the same surreal disaster area as always, and hijinks occur just often enough to keep everyone on their toes—and yet it doesn’t feel like it did when the others were here. The students participate in whatever madness has been set into motion, but none of them have a personal investment in it. In the back of his mind, Jeff can hear Abed’s assessment of the situation: <i>it’s like they’re extras</i>, Abed would say. <i>They’re background. They’re doing this because everyone needs to be doing it for the scene to work. But it’s not really important to their story arc.</i></p>
<p>Jeff wonders if he, too, will become background the longer he stays at Greendale. Everyone else has spun off, as Abed would say, to start their own storylines elsewhere. Britta is still here, and Chang, and Frankie and the Dean—but they can’t replace the rest of the group. Britta can’t replace the youthful persistence of Annie, or Abed’s meta-analytical philosophy, or Shirley’s mix of compassion and passive-aggressive judgment. Just as Jeff can’t be a substitute for Troy’s unique type of nerdy innocence or (thank God) Pierce’s desperate, lonely bigotry. Without the rest of the study group, the two of them are just…themselves.</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem to bother Britta the way it does him. She misses the others—they talk about them pretty often, especially at first—but she’s learning to stand on her own two feet, although with as much grace as a penguin slipping on ice. He knows she talks to Elroy sometimes; their weird bond stuck once he went off to California, and they call one another maybe once a month to catch up. As far as he knows, Britta is the only one out of all of them that Elroy regularly talks to, although Frankie says they’ve exchanged emails and Abed mentioned once that he sometimes gets texts from him with photos of birds he sees on his RV road trips.</p>
<p>He and Annie exchange a lot of messages after she leaves for D.C., but they’re mostly superficial things: apartment photos, and inconsequential comparisons of the differences between Colorado and the East Coast, and every once in a while an admission of homesickness, an <i>I miss Greendale</i> that really means <i>I miss you</i>. Jeff gets most of the important information on her from Frankie, who has been spending a lot of time on the phone with Annie, helping her every time she encounters an adult task she’s never done on her own. Frankie tries to sound dispassionate about the phone calls, but Jeff can tell that underneath all of that, she loves them. It means a lot to her to have someone rely on her—not to save them from themselves, but to help them be the best and most successful <i>version</i> of themselves.</p>
<p>For all the rest of them, it seems to be enough. They can get by on the occasional phone call, or string of updates on group chats or email chains.</p>
<p>It’s not enough for Jeff.</p>
<p>Jeff’s life feels painfully lonely now that everyone has moved on. He thrived on being the center of attention in any room; now everyone’s attention is on other things. While there are still people who look at him with interest or even desire, he finds that it’s not enough for him anymore. The big-shot lawyer he once was would be happy with just the adulation of those around him. But now he has friends. And their absence has left a hole he can’t seem to fill.</p>
<p>Still, he can feel them trying. Craig tries the hardest, of course; he’s always been centered on Jeff to the point of obsession, not that it’s gotten him very far in the past. He invites (or, rather, drags) Jeff along to the weekly happy hours he and Chang have started over the summer, which turn out to be mostly the two of them chaotically bonding over their complicated, ever-evolving sexual preferences. Frankie joins them sometimes, and she’s supportive and friendly but still staunchly refuses to discuss her own sexuality. Jeff is grateful for it. He thinks if she weren’t there, Chang and Craig’s loud, vibrant lack of straightness would force him into a corner, making him look at his own sexual identity more closely than he is prepared to do.</p>
<p>Though the Dean is the first one who actively tries to nudge him out of his slump, he thinks it might be Frankie who first notices that something deeper is wrong beneath the surface. Or maybe it’s Britta, who for all of her misguided blundering, is more perceptive than he expects her to be. They try to steer him away from drinking as much when the group goes out on weekends. At first he resists: he bluffs, pretends they’re overreacting, fakes being more sober than he is. Eventually he does agree to tamp down his alcohol consumption when they go out. But their good intentions backfire; he may be drinking less at bars and restaurants, but for the most part he just starts getting drunk at home.</p>
<p>He knows he’s been found out when Shirley calls. It’s not that he never hears from her normally—but she doesn’t go out of her way to talk just the two of them, and there’s a serious look on her face that’s a sure sign he’s about to get either a lecture, or a concerned-mother talk, or both. She studies him when he connects their video chat, and he’s suddenly acutely aware of how long it’s been since he’s washed his hair, and the lack of effort he’s put into what he’s wearing today. He can tell she’s been worried about him, and the guilt from that slices through him in a cold wave; her father hasn’t been doing well recently, and she shouldn’t have to worry about him on top of it all.</p>
<p>He downplays again, like he did for Britta and Frankie. But Shirley is less easily convinced. “Jeff, honey,” she says, “you realize those same words came out of my mouth not more than a few years ago, right? When I didn’t want people to know I had a problem?”</p>
<p>A flood of anger rushes through Jeff. “It’s also something people say when they’re fine,” he bites out. “Isn’t it? For God’s sake, what else are people supposed to say if they’re fine?”</p>
<p>The look Shirley gives him communicates more than anything she could say in words. <i>If you were really fine, you wouldn’t have to ask what to say to prove it.</i></p>
<p>She tells him she trusts him, but that she’ll check in on him again in a couple weeks, just to be sure. He hates knowing that she’s seeing through him, analyzing him, gauging what stage of trouble he might be in by comparing it against her own history. He’s told himself over and over again that what he’s doing isn’t an issue—but even if it is, he knows he doesn’t want the rest of them involved in it. The more people know what’s happening to him, the less self-contained it feels, and the less control he has over it. If this becomes bigger than him, he doesn’t know how to deal with it anymore.</p>
<p>He can’t let it become bigger than him.</p>
<p>Everyone else’s concern (or forced, overdone attempts to disguise it) are overwhelming, so he starts calling the one person who never seems to do any of that: Abed. In the back of his mind, he recognizes the irony of this choice. Even at Greendale, Abed had seen him at his worst more often than anyone else, and he has always been able to pull Jeff open at the seams and reveal the most uncomfortable and darkest parts of him; if there’s anyone he <i>shouldn’t</i> want to see him right now, it’s Abed. But maybe he’s hoping Abed will ask—or maybe this is his equivalent of pressing his finger on a bruise, looking for the ache that reminds him everyone can see he’s been hurt.</p>
<p>Abed doesn’t bring any of it up, if he even notices. They talk once or twice a month at first, but Jeff finds that he calls Abed more and more often: usually once a week, sometimes more. It’s often a blur to Jeff, who is usually hungover when they talk, and drunk or depressed when he isn’t, and he doesn’t pay too much attention to what they talk about. He knows he doesn’t confess any of the really serious stuff to Abed, but he does go on at length about the surface problems: how difficult and boring and lonely life is at Greendale, his judgments about what everyone else is doing, a fairly constant litany of complaints and self-pity that he doesn’t have the awareness to moderate.</p>
<p>He starts to notice, as the weeks go by, that Abed’s demeanor on the calls changes. He seems tense, more often than not, when they talk. Jeff doesn’t expect Abed’s undivided attention for their entire conversation, but sometimes it seems like Abed isn’t really listening at all. He gives noncommittal answers, or doesn’t answer for long periods of time. When they say goodbye, Abed’s tone of voice is frustrated. It bothers Jeff, but he doesn’t ask. </p>
<p>Then one night near the end of the spring semester, Abed seems irritated from the moment he accepts Jeff’s request for a video call. Jeff has just launched into his usual monologue of frustrations, has barely been going for two minutes when Abed slams the palm of his hand down on the table, startling him out of his diatribe. Jeff scowls at him. “What the hell, Abed?!”</p>
<p>Abed is staring at him in disbelief. “Can you even <i>hear</i> yourself right now?”</p>
<p>“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jeff asks. He’s offended, and confused, and it’s making his already pounding headache worse.</p>
<p>“Did it really never occur to you that you might not be the only one having trouble with the rest of the group going away?”</p>
<p>“I—what are you <i>saying,</i> Abed?”</p>
<p>Abed isn’t very demonstrative in his facial expressions, but Jeff can tell he’s angry. His mouth is tight and his eyes are narrowed, just a little, just enough to show he’s annoyed. </p>
<p>“Being here in L.A. is hard,” Abed says thinly, “harder than I thought. Everyone I know is at least a thousand miles away. And Troy isn’t—Troy isn’t—”</p>
<p>“Troy isn’t coming back,” Jeff finishes in a hollow whisper. Abed’s eyes have gone wide and worried, and his expression is lost. Deep inside Jeff, the cavernous emptiness that has wrapped itself around his heart feels the exact same way.</p>
<p>“The worst timeline was always the one where he left,” Abed says. Jeff isn’t really sure what he means by that—it has to do with the Darkest Timeline and the six different alternate realities, he knows, but the details of that were always a mystery to him. But he thinks miserably, <i>I think the worst timeline for me is the one where all of you leave. Maybe even worse than the one where I never met you at all.</i></p>
<p>“Abed, I’m sorry,” Jeff says through the lump in his throat. He can tell immediately from Abed’s face that his apology doesn’t carry much weight. </p>
<p>“I don’t think I want to talk anymore,” Abed announces, and Jeff says, “Okay,” even though he desperately, <i>frantically</i> wants Abed to stay on the line. If Abed hangs up, then he’s alone. Even though this conversation is making him feel like a miserable asshole, he’d rather have that than have no one to talk to at all.</p>
<p>Before he hangs up, Abed stares a hole straight through him again. “You know the others will listen too,” he says, “if you really need someone to talk to. If it’s too much for you.”</p>
<p>“I know,” Jeff says. </p>
<p>He’s lying. The look on Abed’s face says that he knows it.</p>
<p>The sudden silence in the apartment once the call is over is unbearable. Jeff chucks his phone away from him, a tidal wave of something that feels like rage boiling over. The phone lands on a couch cushion and bounces to a stop, unharmed. Its lack of response even to being thrown seems to taunt Jeff. He sits there and feels his skin vibrating, his fingers trembling. He feels helpless, and weirdly abandoned in a way he suspects grown men in their forties aren’t supposed to feel—but now he feels <i>guilty</i> about it too. </p>
<p>He realizes with a sudden shock the real reason he was so drawn to calling Abed: somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d assumed Abed didn’t have problems of his own right now. He’d made Abed a sounding board for every unimportant annoyance that has collected in his mind, and looking back, he’s not sure he even <i>once</i> asked how Abed was doing. At least not while paying any attention to the answer.</p>
<p>It takes him a long time to get to sleep that night, his mind circling around Abed’s hurt expression, and the sudden clarity that Jeff’s own problems are no longer just his own. They are now something he is actively inflicting on other people.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>“Jeff!” Annie’s chipper voice greets him on the phone the next morning. It’s too early for him to be awake yet, but he wanted to catch Annie before she left for work, and she’s two hours ahead of him. (And if he’s honest, it’s not like he was getting that much sleep anyway.) “To what do I owe the pleasure of this…6 a.m. phone call?”</p>
<p>“Hey, Annie,” Jeff replies. “I know you’re getting ready for work. I just wanted to ask if you could call Abed later tonight.”</p>
<p>“Why? Is everything okay? I usually Skype with Abed on Fridays, but I guess I could call him a little early this week.” </p>
<p>Jeff sighs. “Yeah, everything’s fine. I guess? I don’t know. He seems like he’s lonely out there, and we kind of argued when I was talking to him yesterday, so I don’t think he really wants to hear from me right now. But—”</p>
<p>“You want me to check in on him for you,” Annie says. “Aww, <i>Jeff</i>!”</p>
<p>Jeff can <i>feel</i> himself squirming with the discomfort he always gets in moments like these: when someone sees him being too sincere, showing that he cares too much. It always makes him feel vulnerable and fragile, and his natural impulse is to respond with agitation. “Yeah, okay, don’t get sappy on me,” he grumbles. “Just make sure he’s all right, okay? And—” he grimaces, then adds, “Don’t tell him I said anything to you.”</p>
<p>“I won’t,” Annie promises, and Jeff is pretty sure he believes her. Annie and Abed are close, closer than he and Annie are, but he <i>thinks</i> he can trust that she won’t gossip about him to Abed. </p>
<p>That night, Jeff gets a text from Abed, which surprises him: he’d thought Abed had made his frustration with Jeff pretty clear. Warily he swipes it open. <i>Did you tell Annie to call me after we talked last night?</i></p>
<p>It’s impossible to tell from the wording how Abed feels about this. Jeff starts to just type <i>no</i>, then <i>yes</i>, but then deletes it and hesitantly, carefully gives Abed more of the truth.</p>
<p>
  <i>You said you didn’t want to talk to me<br/>
But I thought someone should still make sure you were ok</i>
</p>
<p>It’s a long time before Abed replies. Finally Jeff’s phone buzzes with a text: <i>You didn’t have to do that.</i> Then, a moment later: <i>Thank you.</i></p>
<p>Jeff doesn’t know how to respond. So he doesn’t say anything at all.</p>
<p>It’s the last text Abed sends him for a long time.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>
  <i>You need to leave your apartment.</i>
</p>
<p>Several hours pass between Abed sending this text, and Jeff replying—even though Abed can tell he hasn’t moved. His dot on the geotracker is steady, immobile, at the exact coordinates of his apartment in Greendale. The text sits in his delivered messages, unread.</p>
<p>Finally, at 2:00 in the morning Colorado time, the status changes to “seen.” Then, almost ten minutes later:</p>
<p>
  <i>why</i>
</p>
<p>He’s getting ready to type a response when several more messages appear on the screen.</p>
<p>
  <i>how do you know if ive left the apt or not<br/>
did britta call you<br/>
is the dean spying on my apartment again?</i>
</p>
<p>Abed frowns at his phone. <i>No one called me. I can see where you are from your tracker. You haven’t moved in days.</i></p>
<p>The “typing…” dots appear and disappear several times in the next few minutes. <i>God damn it abed</i> is what finally appears on his screen.</p>
<p>
  <i>Are you mad because I put the tracker on you, or because it means I know you haven’t left your house?</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>i’m mad because</i>
</p>
<p>Abed waits, but the typing dots appear again once or twice, and then disappear entirely. He suddenly wishes he could see Jeff’s face. Maybe then he could tell what the end of that sentence would look like.</p>
<p><i>I’m not trying to make you mad</i>, Abed sends, because emotions are confusing for him and sometimes it helps if he’s as clear as possible about his intentions in situations like this. </p>
<p>
  <i>You’re not<br/>
I mean, it’s not you<br/>
why are you even awake anyway?<br/>
Is something going on???<br/>
you shouldn’t be staying awake for me</i>
</p>
<p><i>This isn’t about me</i>, Abed types, and then erases it before he can press ‘send.’ <i>You need to leave your apartment. You can’t stay in there forever. </i></p>
<p>
  <i>its 2am. I’ll do it tomorrow</i>
</p>
<p><i>I don’t trust you</i>, Abed replies. It sounds a little harsh when he reads it back, and so he revises, <i>I don’t trust that you’ll do it just because you say you will now. Just go outside and walk around for 5 minutes. Call me on Facetime to prove you’re doing it.</i> He’s drawing on what Annie had done for him, in the first couple of weeks after he moved to L.A.—she would make him walk her around the neighborhood on a video call, to help him feel more at home in his new environment. It had helped: Abed has never been good with change, and Annie knows that, but showing her around had given him a connection to his new home. If it worked for Abed, the least it can do for Jeff is give him a reason to leave the house.</p>
<p>As he contemplates this, a new text pops up on his phone.</p>
<p>
  <i>I don’t want to talk</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>We don’t have to talk. You don’t even have to turn the video around so I can see you. Just go outside for a while, and keep the camera on so I can watch you do it.</i>
</p>
<p>Several minutes go by without a response. Abed’s chest feels heavy, his throat tight. He has no idea whether Jeff will do what he asks, or just choose to ghost him again for months—until finally, eight minutes later, his phone buzzes with a FaceTime call.</p>
<p>The call connects, and he can see Jeff’s apartment, but not Jeff himself. Abed stays true to his word: he sits silently, letting Jeff decide if he wants any kind of conversation. He sets the phone up so that it faces the limited-edition Inspector Spacetime figurine he has sitting on his coffee table; that way he can see what Jeff is filming, but without Jeff having to look at his face. It feels impersonal—but impersonal feels good, right now. Impersonal feels like the only way for either of them to bridge this gap and deal with this.</p>
<p>It takes Jeff a long time to stand up, but after a minute the phone camera shakes and starts moving towards the door of the apartment. Abed breathes out a sigh of relief that he hopes is quiet enough not to be picked up on the call.  Once they get outside, it’s a lot darker; he can’t actually see much of anything, other than the occasional glimpse of trees or yards from the streetlights they pass. But he can hear things: the soft tread of Jeff’s footsteps on the pavement, the wind in the trees, the hum of cars a block or two away.</p>
<p>It’s oddly relaxing, even though it’s meant to be for Jeff’s benefit rather than his own. </p>
<p>It goes on like this for fifteen minutes: Jeff walking with his camera aimed out beside him, Abed sitting next to his phone and watching the darkened scenery go by. Neither one of them says anything. Jeff’s path takes him out of the small downtown stretch and finally lets him out in a public park, deserted now at this hour of the night. Abed watches as he shuffles over to a bench and sags down onto it.</p>
<p>Then, on the other end of the line, he hears a shuddering breath.</p>
<p>“Jeff,” Abed says, quietly—as quietly as he can. He can’t tell whether Jeff is crying or panicking, but he doesn’t want to startle him into stifling whatever emotion he’s finally letting out. So he keeps his voice soft, and waits to see what Jeff will do.</p>
<p>They’re a thousand miles apart, and yet, for this fleeting moment Abed feels like they’re sitting right next to each other. Abed closes his eyes and focuses on the shallow, wet exhalations on the other end of the line. What Jeff actually says next is somehow both surprising and absolutely predictable: “God, I hope a cop doesn’t come by. I am <i>really</i> drunk right now.”</p>
<p>Abed tilts his head back and frowns. “You’ve been drinking a lot lately. Not just tonight.” It’s not a question, and Jeff doesn’t bother to confirm its accuracy. “Why?”</p>
<p>“Why not?” Jeff questions back, without hostility. Now that Abed really listens, he can hear the slight slur in Jeff’s voice; he must not be totally wasted, since he still sounds mostly normal, but that small tell is still there. Mostly he just sounds defeated.</p>
<p>“I don’t think that’s a question I can answer for you,” Abed offers in his familiar impassive tone. “If you want to drink more than you want anything else, I don’t think I can say anything to change your mind.” What he thinks, but does not say, is, <i>And I doubt you would listen if I tried.</i></p>
<p>Jeff sighs. “Listen, Abed. I wasn’t trying to ignore you. I didn’t see your text, that’s all.”</p>
<p>“I know,” Abed says. “You never ignore your texts, even when you’re mad. You have your phone in your hand all the time.”</p>
<p>“The battery was dead,” Jeff admits. “I let it run out. I didn’t want anyone to try and talk to me.”</p>
<p>“<i>Why</i>?” Abed’s voice, for just a moment, loses its matter-of-fact composure as he breathes out this single word. He sounds concerned, and frustrated, and vaguely anguished. Jeff feels heartsick at it.</p>
<p>“Because I’m upset,” Jeff says, letting his own desperation leak into his voice, “and when I’m upset, I hurt people. You—” he chokes on his words, hesitates, then adds, “you know that better than anybody.”</p>
<p>“Because you tried to strangle me?” Abed asks, tilting his head. “When we made the movie together, and you didn’t want me to cut your scene?”</p>
<p>Jeff breathes out a quiet <i>fuck</i>. “That whole year I was a bad friend to you. I hurt you, and sometimes when I was scared of everyone leaving I imagined hurting you again. I yelled at you all the time.” He sighs. “I didn’t do that to the others, at least not as much, and I hate that I did it to you. I don’t want to be the kind of person who does that.”</p>
<p>“Then don’t be,” Abed suggests.</p>
<p>There’s a long pause, long enough that Abed starts to wonder if Jeff heard him, or if it’s possible he got tired and passed out on the park bench. He keeps opening his mouth to say something else and then deciding against it, not wanting to break the fragile balance they’ve found here. And then, right as he’s thinking he needs to say <i>something</i>, the video on his phone judders and starts to pivot as Jeff picks it up—and flips the camera to face him.</p>
<p>The glare of the streetlights combined with the grey nighttime shadows isn’t doing him any favors, but even factoring in those conditions, it’s clear that Jeff doesn’t look good. There are dark circles under his eyes that are visible even in the low lighting of the park. He hasn’t shaved, and not in the suave, scruffy way he sometimes did when they were students together. It makes him look haggard. There’s a haunted look in his eyes that stops Abed’s breath.</p>
<p>It’s a far cry from the confident, devil-may-care version of Jeff that Abed is used to seeing—and yet, he thinks, this is probably what Jeff has always looked like deep down. This is the truth of him that Abed has only ever glimpsed: the anger and pride stripped away to reveal a lonely, vulnerable center. </p>
<p>“Do I really have a choice?” Jeff asks.</p>
<p>Abed frowns again. “What makes you think you don’t?”</p>
<p>“I didn’t want to make any of <i>this</i>—” his hand slices through the air around him, in a gesture encompassing <i>everything about me</i>, “your problem. Any of you. But the more I tried…I started spreading it to you, to <i>all</i> of you, without even meaning to. I didn’t want it to get out of my control any more than it already was. And I’m not teaching any classes during the summer, so I thought: maybe it’s better if I just shut myself inside. Let my phone go dead. Keep everyone else away, just until I get past all this.”</p>
<p>“Jeff, can I ask you a question?” Jeff looks at him and nods. “Are you getting past it?”</p>
<p>Jeff starts to say <i>yes</i>. His lips form around the word, but he doesn’t voice it. He makes a small choked-off sound, and his mouth slowly closes.</p>
<p>“I think you’re going to have to let everyone back in, then,” Abed tells him matter-of-factly.</p>
<p>“Not tonight,” Jeff says, with a pleading look in his eyes. His voice is shaking.</p>
<p>Abed shakes his head. “No. Not tonight.”</p>
<p>Jeff squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again. “I want to go back home now.”</p>
<p>For most of the walk back, they’re silent—but occasionally Jeff offers up a small window of conversation, a little invitation for Abed to take or leave as he chooses. When they get back to the apartment, Abed suggests as gently as he can that maybe Jeff should drink some water and try to sleep. Jeff nods, and props the phone up on the kitchen counter while he pours himself a glass of ice water and sips it slowly until it’s empty. Then, instead of hanging up, he takes Abed to the bedroom with him. For a few quiet moments, he disappears into the bathroom; when he comes out, he’s in comfy sweats and his face looks clean, like he’s taken the time to wash it. </p>
<p>He blinks at the phone and at Abed’s face on it, almost as if he’d forgotten Abed was there. The silence stretches out for a long time before Jeff slides to a sitting position at the edge of the bed.</p>
<p>“It’s late,” Jeff says finally, and he’s right: it’s almost 2 a.m. in Los Angeles, which means it’s even later for Jeff. “You should go to bed. You shouldn’t—I mean, you don’t have to stay up for me.”</p>
<p>Abed shrugs. “I’m up anyway,” he replies. During the stretches of time—from a weekend to several weeks—when he’s not working on set, he swings wildly between sleeping all hours of the day and night, or not sleeping at all for two days straight. It probably doesn’t bode well for his own mental health, but between the two of them he’s not the one with the worst issues tonight. “Go to sleep. I’ll hang up when I’m ready.”</p>
<p>Jeff’s eyes go soft at that. There’s a quiet admission in what Abed has said that reveals something he needs to hear: this phone call is not just for Jeff’s sake, to babysit him until he takes proper care of himself. Abed’s not ready to say goodbye yet. The least he can do is let his friend sit here, on the call with him, until he falls asleep.</p>
<p>“Plug in your phone,” Abed instructs, “so it doesn’t run out of battery again while you’re sleeping.” Jeff does it, without even rolling his eyes. Once he’s sitting in bed, he looks at Abed again with a vulnerable, soulful expression. </p>
<p>It’s easier to make eye contact through a video camera, so Abed stares back at him. “Are you okay?” he asks. </p>
<p>Jeff scrubs a hand over his face and rests his elbows on his knees. Abed is expecting another breakdown, but when Jeff lifts his head again, his eyes are dry. “Yeah,” he says. “I think…I think once I sleep all this off, I’ll be fine.” He looks Abed in the eye again. “You mean it? You’ll stay?”</p>
<p>“I’ll stay,” Abed repeats solemnly. He watches as Jeff lies down. With his head on the pillow, Abed can see Jeff, but Jeff can no longer see him. He studies Jeff in silence; the other man’s eyes look lost again, haunted for a minute or two, but then they start to droop as he feels exhaustion overtake him. Slowly, Jeff’s breaths even out. His eyes close, and within ten minutes Abed can tell he’s fallen asleep. </p>
<p>Abed still stays on the video call for another twenty minutes, alternating between reading and looking out the window and watching Jeff. It feels good, for this one brief moment, not to spend the night by himself. When he sleeps, it’s easy and uninterrupted, and he feels better on waking than he’s felt in days.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>Jeff doesn’t give up drinking entirely. Deep down, he knows he probably should; his relationship with alcohol has been unhealthy for longer than he’s willing to admit, since he was a depressingly young age. But he finds that these days, he doesn’t rely on it as much. He still hits lows that end with him slumped at his kitchen counter, an empty glass of scotch next to him. But his downward spirals no longer last as long or plummet as low as they used to. With his support system in place, he doesn’t have as far to fall.</p>
<p>The more Jeff thinks about it, the more he realizes that in a lot of ways, they all barely made it through their six years at Greendale. He’s honestly not sure they would have survived it without each other. They helped each other out of bars when they were trashed at the end of a long night; pulled each other out of meltdowns where they fully lost touch with the real world; just barely earned the grades they needed through teamwork and sheer force of will; took every insane, unbelievable thing the school threw at them in stride because they were up against it together. It’s not so different now that they’re scattered across the country, he supposes. The world’s not designed to work in their favor, but if they all run full-tilt against it together, they can outlast it one adventure at a time.</p>
<p>Maybe the universe really <i>did</i> mold them into some sort of super-group through an endless cycle of screwups, like he’d said all those years ago.</p>
<p>One night several months later, he gets a call before bed from Abed. “He’s back,” he says breathlessly, “Troy—he’s back,” and Jeff is so happy for him—or at least he thinks he is, except that the bottom feels like it’s falling out of his stomach. He knows two things with absolute certainty: Troy has always been Abed’s favorite person in the world, and Jeff has gotten used to having all of Abed’s attention to himself. </p>
<p>He sits in that feeling all the next day. In some deep, defeatist part of his mind, there is no competition to be had between him and Troy. Abed will refocus his energies on the two of them becoming Troy-and-Abed again, and once more everyone will move on without him. Jeff Winger, the ringleader of the group—yet somehow, he feels, the easiest one to forget.</p>
<p>But then something interesting happens. Three nights after Abed’s first awestruck phonecall to tell him the news, and two days after Troy and Abed had called Jeff together to say hello and tell him all about the trip around the world, Jeff gets a video call from Abed’s computer that turns out to be Troy—by himself. </p>
<p>They talk for almost two hours, just the two of them. Troy tells him more about his trip—the things he saw that he’d never even heard of or imagined, the adventures he and Levar got up to, his favorite places and the things he missed most about Greendale. But something changes, as the call continues. And Troy tells him about feeling afraid; about feeling <i>alone</i>. He tells Jeff his biggest fear was of never coming home, and that several times over the course of the trip, he had reason to believe his fears might come true. Or he would imagine he’d come home and no one would be there—that maybe Greendale itself would be gone, like the fake psychologist had tried to get them to believe when they’d been expelled during Chang’s dictatorship.</p>
<p>That particular hypothetical is a little outlandish, but Troy’s fear is real—and so, it turns out, are some of his reasons for having been afraid. Troy had been lost at sea and scared of never coming home, and Jeff had been scared of being left behind in a place he’d never had the courage to depart from, but at the core of it all they were worried about the same exact thing: being alone.</p>
<p>And Jeff thinks about Abed on the phone that night months before, lonely and untethered in Los Angeles for the first time in his life, telling Jeff that he wasn’t the only one scared of being on his own. He thinks of Annie calling Frankie every time she needs help. He thinks of Elroy, never staying in one place for too long but always sending photos to keep him rooted in someone and someplace familiar. He thinks of every time they’ve texted each other in the group chat, at 3:00 in the morning in whatever timezone they’re in, and how almost always someone is awake and responds.</p>
<p>They’re all afraid of the same thing. And none of them is ever actually alone. Whether they’re on the East Coast or the West, or somewhere in between, there is someone else from Greendale there with them—maybe not nearby, sometimes hours away, but still there. And even if they weren’t, there would be group chats and phone conversations and someone to sit next to on a video call in the night, when he’s drunk and sad and can’t sleep. When his world feels bigger than he can stand, and too small for him to bear.</p>
<p>He tells Troy <i>you were never really alone</i>, and Troy says “I know, Abed had a tracker on me, remember? He told us. So he could always see me wherever I was.” And Jeff can’t help it: a tear rolls down his cheek, and he has to wave away Troy’s panicked apologies. When Troy starts crying too out of sympathy, he bursts into a wave of laughter, until both of them are laughing and crying at the same time.</p>
<p>Sometime while he is sheepishly drying his eyes, Abed comes home from work. He doesn’t comment on the sight before him—he just slides into the seat next to Troy, their sides pressed together. “Hi Jeff,” he says in his familiar nonchalant tone.</p>
<p>Jeff sighs and laughs a little, good-naturedly, at himself. “Hi,” he says. “Abed, I—I never said thank you. That night.”</p>
<p>Troy looks at Abed questioningly. Abed narrows his eyes—not with anger, but his casual piercing scrutiny, the kind that has always terrified him in the past because of how easily it sees through his façade. “It was nice for me too,” he says after a moment. “Thank you for letting me.” </p>
<p>He's about to let the moment pass when something occurs to him. “Hey, why were you even paying that much attention to where I was on that tracker thing? You knew I hadn’t been outside in days when you called. Did someone tell you to keep an eye on me?”</p>
<p>Abed’s face goes suddenly blank. It’s what he does when he’s been caught in a situation he didn’t expect, or doesn’t know how to get out of. Troy looks confused, but he’s watching Abed very carefully, the way he does when he’s preparing to jump in and run interference.</p>
<p>“I look at your tracker all the time,” Abed says then. He states it plainly, almost in a monotone. “All of you. So I don’t—“ His voice wavers slightly. “So I know where you are. Where you’re going.”</p>
<p>It would be hard for anyone who didn’t know Abed to see the emotions beneath the surface, but his eyes are darting and his fingers are twitching and the rest of his body is rigid. Troy wraps an arm around his shoulders. “We’re not going anywhere, buddy,” he says, and Abed relaxes the slightest bit.</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Jeff adds. He wishes he could hug Abed, gather him close the way he did after some of their heart-to-hearts the last couple of years at Greendale. “You’re not gonna lose us.” He laughs, punctuating it with a self-deprecating shrug. “Especially not me, since I’m probably never gonna leave Greendale anyway. You don’t even need a tracker to find me. I mean, where the hell else am I gonna go, right?”</p>
<p>Abed smiles this private, kind smile that Jeff has found disarms him completely, and says, “You could come and live with us.” </p>
<p>Jeff chuckles, his voice watery. “Yeah,” he says, feeling warm and sparkly and fragile all at once. “Yeah, maybe I will.”</p>
<p>He means it as a joke. He doesn’t think he’s ready to leave Greendale full time. But weeks go by, and Abed keeps calling, and the two of them and Troy sit on video chats and have serious conversations, and finally Abed suggests it: maybe Jeff should have two homes. Teach every year for one semester at Greendale; spend the other half of the year in California, living with them. </p>
<p>It feels too good to be true, like the kind of future that can’t actually happen. But Abed and Troy have always made their own private reality. And now, they’re inviting Jeff into the world they’re creating.</p>
<p>Four months later, after the end of the spring semester, he’s on a plane to Los Angeles.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>From then on, he never lets his phone run out of battery on purpose, if he can help it. And when he needs help, he picks it up and he calls.</p>
<p>And—even if it’s not right away— someone always answers.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>As with some other fics I've done, I'm labelling this as complete for the time being, but there is a solid chance this will end up getting at least one more part (and turning definitively romantic, but I wasn't able to get them over that line for now)! So stay tuned just in case I'm ever able to pull that together.</p>
<p>I wrote this fic out of deep gratitude for <i>Community</i>, which my roommate and I watched for the first time during quarantine- like many people did- and which got me through my lowest and most anxious period of social isolation during this Covid lockdown. This show pulled me out of a weeks-long bout of constant anxiety by literally hooking me and overriding my panicked brain with something to fixate on. I'm so glad I found it at exactly the time I did.</p>
<p>Even with my love of the show, though, this fic would literally not have happened without the fandom discord server I'm a part of, because it was literally inspired by conversations we had there. And it would have taken 3-6 times as long to write if they hadn't been cheering me on. Thanks to all of you &lt;3</p>
<p>You can find me on tumblr at <a href="http://imaginedmelody.tumblr.com">imaginedmelody</a>, where I love talking about my vast array of fandoms and making new friends.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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